"In the distant future they will have what I call 'the Tickles'," said Alfred Hitchcock in 1963. "People will go into a big darkened auditorium and they will be mass-hypnotized. Instead of identifying themselves with the characters on screen, they will be that character, and when they buy their ticket, they will be able to choose which character to be. They will suffer all of the agonies and enjoy the romance with a beautiful woman or handsome man. I call them 'the Tickles' because when a character is tickled, the audience will feel it. Then, the lights come up and it's all over."

Hitchcock, son of a greengrocer, started off in theatre and moved into film, the new medium of his age, changing how we told stories. My background, meanwhile, is in audience engagement for the BBC. But in November 2010, after successfully launching the Facebook page for Doctor Who, I started asking myself the question: how would Alfred tell a story today?

Not with a film, was my conclusion. Instead I think he would be using all the devices now available to us to tell stories – and one thing's for sure, his audience would take part in them.

The biggest problem with this new audience appetite for immersive worlds is finding writers who know how to create them. When my company Portal Entertainment started out there were no 'immersive writers' – TV writers tell great linear stories, while game writers focus on the non-linear, but their concept of dramatic conflict can be weak. We decided to create an event to rectify this.

Together with BBC Writers Room, Circalit, Imaginox and Stellar Network we created the Immersive Writing Lab, a two day event in August 2011 and accompanying three month competition to develop and grow the immersive writers of tomorrow. We got more than 120 entries, read more than 2,500 pages and we are now working with the winner of last year's competition.

This year, the lab returns with a focus on roleplay – how to get your audience to discover and navigate themselves through your story. The best way we've found to try and solve this challenge is looking laterally at forms of entertainment that have been changing their performance mode for hundreds of years – comedy, immersive theatre and magic – as well as new forms of entertainment such as interactive comics and the 'perceptive media' coming out of BBC R&D. Curious minds are definitely welcome.

After a first day of theory, we run the fun bit, the workshop, where teams of writers work together to come up with a storyworld. Henry Jenkins, screenwriter and author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, puts it this way: "When I first started, you would pitch a story because without a good story you didn't really have a film. Later, once sequels started to take off, you pitched a character because a good character could support multiple stories. And now, you pitch a world because a world can support multiple characters and multiple stories across multiple media."

The workshop day ran fantastically well last year – and a lot of those same teams are still working together. In the next few months, we will run another three month competition, with £6,000 going to the winning storyworld. We don't have all the answers, but if the Immersive Writing Lab has taught us anything, it's that there are more curious minds than ever who want to create worlds for audiences to take part in, regardless of the medium. If you are one of them, the lab might just be for you.